WMAP Amplifiers

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WMAP Amplifiers

Centimeter-wave radio astronomy receivers (under 50 GHz) now almost universally use cooled HFET (heterostructure field-effect transistor) amplifiers as the low-noise input amplifier. The NRAO has worked on the development of these amplifiers for many years and is largely responsible for their wide acceptance by the radio astronomy community. We designed and built 120 such amplifiers (seen here) for use on the satellite for mapping the cosmic microwave background radiation, originally called the Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) and now known as the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).

Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF

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